Soundlab: A platform for experiment in art, science and technology

Armenia Art Foundation and Gyumri Technology Center are launching Soundlab: A platform for experiment in art, science and technology. The program will be held in April-August 2019 in a format of artistic research residency curated by composer, pianist and sound artist Vardan Harutyunyan and it will take place in Gyumri, Armenia.

Soundlab aims at creating productive environment for research, experimentation, production and presentation in sound art. Based at Gyumri Technology Center, the residency will not only take its roots from the city of Gyumri, but it will also actively interact with the city and its daily life through different types of public events and artistic interventions.

The theme of the first collaborative artistic research conducted in residency is Wave >>Language. Wave is the basic form in the construction of existence and energy, it exists in every material in different depths, on a visible level or in microworld, like the movement in atoms. These constant fluctuations build a unique “language” and organize information in the reality as we know it.

One of the points of departure for this research is a concept of the spectrogram, a visual representation of frequencies of sound, light, math functions or historical processes as they vary with time. By presenting processes by their wave functions, the spectrogram will offer wide range of possibilities to think through the phenomena of sound, wave and language.

The activities of seismic waves that turned the vibrant city of Gyumri into a broken one in 1988, as well as social and cultural landscape- holding the waves of local and world history- will give the second focus for artistic researches. Today, as the city is going through slow revitalization and the issue of building new narratives is crucial, the complexity of ideas raised by the theme of Wave >>Language will support the vibration of changes in Gyumri.

The sub-grant is implemented in the frames of Bridge4CSOs project led by AGBU in partnership with EPF and funded by the European Union.

Soundlab invites experimental composers and artists who work with sound and reside in Armenia, to investigate the theme of Wave>>Language and run a multidisciplinary artistic research within a residency program in Gyumri, April – August 2019.